That’s specifically why I and other conservatives refused to vote for the shit sandwich, and voted otherwise.
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No thanks, ya govoryu po russky, I can read the original news and documents.
Ok, this is the example of Soviet whataboutism employed by the US right wing media, notably FOX. The Russian built on the original clumsy Soviet concept and turned it into a slick propaganda tool that after Russian propaganda is now being appropriated by US media outlets.
It’s simple really - establish a false equivalency at the soundbite level, aggressively push into a counteroffensive and tacitly claim that there are two parallel truths and that even basic facts are partisan.
You could see this in the genesis of the reply to this whistleblower thing - before they started milking the Biden angle the first response was “what we need to declassify are Obama’s phone calls with the Iranians”. Create a false equivalency, go on the attack with an outlandish accusation and reduce the issue to partisan “he said, she said”
But’s lets deconstruct accusations against Creepy Joe Biden and the false equivalency.
The IMF and the EU put 2,6 billion and 1,2 billion of Western loans to Ukraine on hold because of prosecutor Shokin. Fire Shokin and get the money was the message, albeit somewhat couched in legalese.
As the Ukrainians tried to play US against the EU, the Germans asked State Department for help. So the Americans decided to fly in Creepy Joe. Now, creepy Joe is no known for his mental acumen, but he can deliver a 5 minute blunt warning - fire Shokin and get the money, we (the West) all agree on this. Also, 1 billion of US loan guarantees was on the line. They even had Biden sit on a session of the Ukrainians parliament for two hours until three major anti corruption bills were passed.
Again, this wasn’t a private vendetta of Biden, his visit and request was part of a official EU/US joint policy towards Ukraine on which all the Western stakeholders agreed to.
Instead of relying on John Solomon, read this from a former Kyiv Post journalist who neatly summarized all the brazen projections Trump and his acolytes did:
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Exactly. People are not following the timeline of events. Biden showed up late to the table of people calling for his removal. And it was only after he was asked to do so.
Given the timeline of events, that no one disputes, it doesn’t make the allegations that plausible. Again, Biden was asked to intervene and again, no one disputes that (they simply avoid mentioning it).
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No evidence as been forwarded to back that up.
Which doesn’t make it true.
Love her, hate her, or just think she is an annoyance…
Kelly Anne Conway has herself embedded in both the English Lexicon and peoples very actions with her now famous (infamous?) “alternative facts”.
[quote=“zecarlo, post:1930, topic:250592, full:true”]
No evidence as been forwarded to back that up.
[quote=“Jewbacca, post:1923, topic:250592”]
I’m not sure I understand your post.
Are you saying there is no evidence there was a pending investigation about Buwhatever (the oil company) and Bindem, Jr? Because that’s undisputed as far as I know. JB is correct that the investigation was pending for some time after the termination of the investigating lawyer; ABC issued a correct on its earlier story saying there was no pending investigation.
Or are you saying that the allegations against Buwhatever are unproven? They paid an undisclosed fine for corruption to settle the case.
Or something else?
I’m trying to figure out the wrong act Trump is supposed to have done in the call.
As far as I understand it, the alleged wrongdoing by Trump was threatening to withhold military aid unless the Ukranians re-opened the investigation into Buwhatever. I never saw the threat to withhold aid and, while the allegations against Buwhatever are not proven, something appears to be “off” with the dismissal.
What’s the illegal about asking someone to look into an plausible accusation?
Or is the point there you think there is not a plausible accusation against BUwhatever?
That’s simply wrong. Undisputed wrong.
From my reading of it, once I could dig through the Trumpian train of thought (which is so scatter brained that I believe this transcript to be almost verbatim), the issue is that Biden’s investigation was brought up after the Ukranian president mentioned arms assistance.
Now, the problem for Trump opponents is that the first thing he mentioned accords with Trump’s version of why he withheld aid, namely his belief that surrounding countries should be doing more. This occurred first.
The problem for Trump apologists is that he does mention a potential political opponent in a call that involves aid for Ukraine. The Ukranian president may have taken this as a quid pro quo, and Trump could have possibly intended it as such.
It looks like crap for Trump, but I stand by my initial assessment that this will explode in the Democrat’s faces, and that he won’t be overly harmed by it.
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I don’t think you know what undisputed means.
On a serious note;
Do you all see “alternative facts” at play here?
So, to be clear, you are disputing that March 2016 (the month where Biden Sr went to the Ukraine and the prosecutor was dismissed) is before January 2017 (the month when Buriwhatever announced the dismissal of the prosecution)?
Calendars in my world work differently than yours.
I’m disputing that Biden’s son’s company was under investigation. In fact, the investigation had been dormant for a year. I dispute that Biden went based on his own initiative rather than after being asked by EU officials and the state department. I dispute that Biden was trying to end an investigation, an investigation that had been closed for a year, rather than get a prosecutor in there who would actually investigate.
Also, what power did Biden have in 2017?
In the context of discussing aid to Ukraine, Trump immediately requests a personal favor not in the public interest. The face of the transcript establishes that.
Add to that two things we know: 1) Trump had already been trying to get the favor through private channels with Giuliani (an obvious concession the favor is personal) and 2) Trump personally intervened to withhold Congressionally appropriated funds from Ukraine contemporaneously with all this.
Impeachment worthy? Who knows. Sufficient evidence of corruption and the President using political leverage and U.S. tax dollars for personal and political gain that warrants an investigation? Unquestionably.
Well, that’s just incorrect. There were numerous trips by lawyers for Hunter Biden after March 2016 to the Ukraine for negotiations with the new prosecutor to end the proceeding.
You very well may be correct. But the prosecutor says otherwise under sworn testimony. Classic he-said, he-said that bears investigation.
First of all, Giuliani and his team did a great job of creating a ready-to-publish fake narrative that sounds plausible to people not familiar with the day-to-day of Ukrainian politics:
"An intrepid prosecutor came too close to Creepy Joe’s cokehead son and Joe flew in and bailed out his drug addled son. So the tables are turned, Creepy Joe is the real villain and Donald only wanted to get to the bottom of all that. "
But that’s bullshit. prosecutor was openly bought by the boss of bosses of the Russian mafia and people were picketing daily the Government for his dismissal. “Shokin’s dismissal” was the 2016 saga of Ukraninian politics and pundits were wondering whether international (read: Western pressure) will be enough to get him fired.
These two articles (the first one from 2017) are a lengthy and confusing read but one of the few instances of detailed English language coverage:
This is Dmytro Firtash I’ve mentioned before. I wasn’t aware that he allied himself with Trump’s people and I thought he was doing this on his on, but his criminal network can produce sworn affidavits with whichever content one wishes from a plethora of unsavoury characters who from the outside seem respectable - “oh, here’s one from a former prosecutor, this deserves further investigation” - it’s a fucking paid Russian mobster producing whichever content he chooses.
Consider the case of Ukrainian billionaire Dmytro Firtash, which could play into one of the conservative blogosphere’s favorite obsessions: the idea that Ukraine played a role in furthering the “witch hunt” — that is, U.S. Democrats’ efforts to find evidence of Trump’s connection to Russian election meddling.
Firtash, who got rich playing middleman between Russian and Ukrainian energy companies, has long been fighting extradition to the U.S. from Austria. He’s wanted for allegedly bribing Indian officials more than a decade ago, but he could be valuable in other ways: He was once close to now-deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, and therefore might know about the Ukrainian activities of Paul Manafort, Trump’s disgraced former campaign chairman.
Earlier this year, on the verge of being sent to America, Firtash retained a duo of Trump-connected American lawyers and presented a Vienna court with a wealth of documents that he says prove that the extradition request was actually politically motivated. Among those documents is an affidavit from former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who testified that Biden “directly manipulated the political leadership of Ukraine on false pretexts” to prevent Firtash from leaving Austria for Ukraine – where, as a Ukrainian citizen, he couldn’t be extradited.
This is the same Shokin whom Biden has boasted of getting fired by threatening to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee. The former prosecutor has since said that Biden — then the U.S. vice president — did it to thwart a Ukrainian investigation into Burisma, a natural gas company where his son Hunter was a well-paid board member. Although the claim is probably false, Trump has picked it up and pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate, sparking a separate scandal about the current U.S. president’s use of his office to dig up dirt on a potential election rival.
Expect the Trump team to try to show that Biden abused his power by coercing Ukrainian authorities into helping him get a prospective Russiagate witness to the U.S. If Firtash works with Trump’s people, he can also provide a steady supply of testimony and documents suggesting that Obama administration officials, including Biden, actively meddled in Ukraine’s domestic politics after 2014. Whether or not they had corrupt motives in doing so is almost irrelevant — conservative conspiracy theorists will take it from there
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I’ll read that after you answer my question above.
Which question? Shokin refused to cooperate with UK law enforcement and killed the Buresma inquiry (from the UK side).
Yes, Hunter Biden may have been dealing with the NEW prosecutor because…the old one wasn’t doing his job. Hence Biden calling for the old one’s removal.